Advice for home server build

MeMeMeMe · 17 Apr 2011 at 14:32

I'm considering building a small windows home server, but it must have room for 4 hard disks.

How cheaply could I build a small server, considering I already have the software and the disks.
What would be a good case?
Likewise, what would be a good CPU/MBoard/RAM for a home server?

jbloggs · 17 Apr 2011 at 15:55

Something like this possibly:

G31/G41 motherboard

Intel Celeron E3400

2 x 1GB Kingston PC2-6400C5

Or an equivalent AMD system...

swinnie · 17 Apr 2011 at 15:58

Look at the HP MicroServer. It's got £100 cashback for this month, and possibly May as well (can't remember). I've got Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 running on it perfectly with a further two 1TB discs for backup. Really impressed with build quality. It's also very, very quiet.

MeMeMeMe · 18 Apr 2011 at 08:23

jbloggs, thhose components look okay. Any idea about a suitable smallish case that can hold 4 or more hard disks?

The Microserver looks pretty nice, though I'm not too keen at the lack of RAID5 support. Still, the price is very tempting.

jbloggs · 18 Apr 2011 at 10:54

Coolermaster 335 - this is what I use for my WHS box...

Xigmatek Asgard

If you are using the Windows Home Server OS, you will not need or want to use RAID5...

Also, if you wanted to use more than 4 HDDs with any G31/G41 motherboard, all you would have to do is add a PCI SATA (RAID) card for the extra SATA ports...

JonJ678 · 18 Apr 2011 at 12:46

Raid 5 is unlikely to be a good idea for a home server. That aside, if you use linux (FreeNAS is pretty friendly if you don't want to learn anything new) you can run raid 5 with no problems at all.

Disco Boy · 18 Apr 2011 at 12:46

What do you want to use it for? Is it purely a file server?

MeMeMeMe · 18 Apr 2011 at 20:30

It's mainly a file server yes, and a place to backup files from other computers or images of those computers.
I will access the files from the HTPC, using mediaportal to view media so the server won't need media transcoding or other fancy features.

MeMeMeMe · 18 Apr 2011 at 20:31

jbloggs said:
Coolermaster 335 - this is what I use for my WHS box...

Xigmatek Asgard

The problem with those cases is their height. I want to put my machine on a shelf that's about 350mm tall, and 480mm-ish wide.
Would they be fine being put on their side?

MeMeMeMe · 18 Apr 2011 at 20:33

JonJ678 said:
Raid 5 is unlikely to be a good idea for a home server. That aside, if you use linux (FreeNAS is pretty friendly if you don't want to learn anything new) you can run raid 5 with no problems at all.

I'm not planning on using linux. Windows Home Server 2011 is most likely.
What's wrong with RAID 5?

JonJ678 · 19 Apr 2011 at 00:23

There's a tendency to confuse raid 5 with a backup. The improved read speeds can be worthwhile, but the redundancy isn't all that if you can get away with occasional downtime. I'm speaking as a home user who ran a four disk raid 5 for a while before changing to backups on the grounds that they're more reliable.

Perhaps windows has a decent software raid implementation.

jbloggs · 19 Apr 2011 at 10:05

MeMeMeMe said:
The problem with those cases is their height. I want to put my machine on a shelf that's about 350mm tall, and 480mm-ish wide.
Would they be fine being put on their side?

I would think if it was motherboard side down, everything screwed home tight and good ventilation it should be fine...

As regards RAID5, WHS (version 1) used drive extender (with duplication) which made using RAID unnecessary, I believe that DE is also now going to be implemented into WHS 2011 via some kind of addon (please correct if I am wrong), which again would make using RAID5 unnecessary as DE (with duplication on) makes it so much easier dealing with a failing HDD and protection of data...

Disco Boy · 19 Apr 2011 at 10:42

MeMeMeMe said:
It's mainly a file server yes, and a place to backup files from other computers or images of those computers.
I will access the files from the HTPC, using mediaportal to view media so the server won't need media transcoding or other fancy features.

Can you not just use a decent NAS?

MeMeMeMe · 20 Apr 2011 at 07:08

Disco Boy said:
Can you not just use a decent NAS?

I have one (Synology CS-407), and it as an excellent little 4-drive NAS. But I'm planning to migrate to a windows home server-based machine. The reason: I have taken drives out of the NAS and tried to extract data from them in windows machines, to see if I could, even using software that is supposed to be able to access ext2/3/4 file systems, and never managed to succeed. I'm not using RAID on the NAS - these are formatted as single drives.
Sooner or later, the NAS is going to fail, and when that happens the data on the drives will be unreadable. I want to transfer to an NTFS-based machine to I am protected from that.

WHS's data duplication looks excellent, if a bit inefficient.

MeMeMeMe · 20 Apr 2011 at 07:10

jbloggs said:
As regards RAID5, WHS (version 1) used drive extender (with duplication) which made using RAID unnecessary, I believe that DE is also now going to be implemented into WHS 2011 via some kind of addon (please correct if I am wrong), which again would make using RAID5 unnecessary as DE (with duplication on) makes it so much easier dealing with a failing HDD and protection of data...

MS isn't going to be supporting any form of drive extender in WHS 2011. At least two companies are working on plugins to give that functionailty back, and one of them will work in other versions of windows too (at least win7, Win server 2008).